I didn't include your patch in my 0.9.38 debian/ubuntu builds, in part because I forgot, and in part because tomcat8 still worked, it's still in sid, buster, and disco. If they remove tomcat8 (and the link in comment 2 says it won't be in buster), then my builds will break. I'll guess I'll deal with it when it happens.

What I'll probably do for .39 is add support in all the config and build.xml files for both 8 and 9, so we won't need any patch.

In e70ab57c097b2669086ca15f9f939f709b0a59f8 to be 0.9.38-1
Adds with-libtomcat9-java build option as proposed in comment 4 above.
Build tested only by me, but mhatta has tested the running of it as noted in comment 3 above.
If there's any other issues, we'll find out soon enough.
Not clear atm if 8 will be removed from Disco, but 0.9.39 will be out before Disco is, so I don't foresee needing to re-release 0.9.38 in my PPA or our project deb disco repo.